I admit it, I do read critical reviews and responses. Sometimes I learn something about my writing that I hadn't noticed before. More often, I learn a great deal about the critic. But either way I learn something about the effect my work has on others.

Now, in this case, not particularly noteworthy, but it's a good jumping off point for the discussion that follows, the sum total of this fellow's analysis was, "Your writing sucks."

Well, hell -- I already know that. Hold up anything I've written and I can tell you all about its flaws, everything I did not achieve. I can show you where the prose is clumsy, where the characterization was shallow, where the structure was shaky, where the flow from one idea to the next was turbulent. I can show you everything I wished I had done better, but was already bumping up against the limits of my ability.

In that, I am not alone. Any writer worth his/her keyboard feels the same way. We know what what we wanted to achieve, we're painfully conscious of the distance between the result and the ideal.

Writers seek perfection. But the universe conspires against perfection. There is no purity. The best we can achieve is excellence -- and a book is never completed, it's only abandoned when it's no longer cost-effective to keep polishing.

My response to the above individual was, "If that's the worst you can say about me, you don't know me very well."

And that's true. In my eyes, my writing does suck. It's not good enough. It will never be good enough.

But sometimes it's ambitious, and in those efforts the best I can say about my work is that it's evidence that "a man's speech must exceed his task or what's a metaphor?"

"Your writing sucks." Yeah, I agree. So what? Over here, that's not an insult, it's the motivation to do better next time.